ELECTION AFTERMATH / Turnout swamped 'ranked' software

Suzanne Herel, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published 4:00 am, Friday, November 5, 2004

The software designed to tabulate the ranked-choice voting results of San Francisco's seven district supervisor races was overwhelmed by voter turnout, its makers said Thursday -- but it took just a minor computer programming adjustment to fix the system.

The tabulation of votes in the city's first ranked-choice election was brought to a halt Wednesday because the computer program used to carry out the calculations wasn't written with such a large turnout in mind, said Lou Dedirer, of Election Systems and Software, the Omaha, Neb., company that sold San Francisco the system.

"Think of it like having a basketball too big to go through the hoop," Dedirer said. "We're getting a bigger hoop."

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On Thursday, a computer programming adjustment was submitted to the secretary of state, California's chief election official, and was expected to be approved for use by this morning. If that's the case, preliminary results of four still-contested supervisor races -- in Districts 1, 5, 7 and 11 -- could be released by the end of today.

No one representing the city's Department of Elections, the secretary of state or Election Systems and Software at a news conference Thursday afternoon could explain how the new computer system previously passed a number of federal, state and local tests without the problem being detected.

In essence, Dedirer said, the creator of the software included certain limits on how much data could be accepted into the program that ranks voters' first, second and third choices and determines a winner after sequentially eliminating low-vote getters and redistributing their votes.

"It was a volume issue," Dedirer said. He added that a large number of voters had registered at the last minute.

In hindsight, he said, it makes sense to remove the limitation from the software to accommodate high voter turnout.

Elections Director John Arntz said a software engineer from the Nebraska company had been on hand for the debut of the system Wednesday but could not figure out the glitch, which arose at 1 p.m. when elections officials began running the system.

On Thursday, Election Systems and Software flew more people to San Francisco to assess the problem.

Arntz released the results of roughly 4,800 absentee ballots that had not been counted until Thursday, but they made virtually no change in election results in any of the four district supervisor races that remained contested.

Supervisors Aaron Peskin, who represents District 3 in North Beach and Chinatown, and Michela Alioto-Pier, appointed by Mayor Gavin Newsom to represent District 2, in the Marina and Pacific Heights areas, won their races outright on election day by garnering more than 60 percent of the vote.

District 9 Supervisor Tom Ammiano, too, is considered to have retained his seat, having just over 50 percent of the vote.

San Francisco voters approved the ranked-choice voting method in 2002, but this was the first election in which it was used.

Also called instant runoff voting, the method eliminates the need for costly runoff elections. Under the system, voters rank their top three choices. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote, the lowest vote- getter is eliminated, and the second-ranked choices on those ballots are redistributed. The process continues -- moving onto voters' third choices if necessary -- until one candidate wins the majority of remaining votes.

Arntz said it could take about three weeks to reach an official result in all races because there were still 65,000 absentee and provisional ballots -- those cast by voters whose eligibility needs to be verified -- left to be counted. The preliminary results that could be released as early as today won't take into account these 65,000 ballots. By state law election results must be certified by Nov. 30.

These races are yet to be decided:

-- District 1, the Richmond, where support for incumbent Jake McGoldrick is at 41.8 percent to challenger Lillian Sing's 29.9 percent.

-- District 5, where the seat is being vacated by board President Matt Gonzalez, who represents Haight-Ashbury, Cole Valley and surrounding neighborhoods. Ross Mirkarimi holds the lead with 28.7 percent of the vote to Robert Haaland's 14.7 percent.

-- District 7, west of Twin Peaks, where appointed incumbent Sean Elsbernd holds 32.4 percent of the vote to Christine Linnenbach's 22.1 percent.

-- District 11, the Excelsior and OMI neighborhoods, where Supervisor Gerardo Sandoval's support is at 32.6 percent to Myrna Lim's 18 percent.